InDesign gets used more and more by people to create interactive PDFs, Flash buttons, eBooks, and even complete websites with. My standard advice to those people comes down to this: InDesign is primarily a tool to design books with. Printed matter. Everything else is a bonus, and you should not expect top notch performance, optimised output, or additional functions for any of these "side-products". It's a good choice for making pages, nothing else.

So I used InDesign CS4 to do the layout for a large dictionary; >650 pages, two columns, small font, about 6600 characters per page. Three "main" paragraph styles, indicating Main Entry, Subentry, Additional information. About 15 additional character styles: main entry word, usual bold and italics for emphasis, but also a custom arrow, a custom small space, custom backgrounds for sub-entry indications, and custom superscripts -- plus a few GREP styles to prevent bad breaks between a couple of frequently occuring marker combinations. Every single paragraph of 2 to 8 lines contains at least 10 different character styles.

I was wise enough not to put everything into a single large document; this is 20 separate files, one for each letter. File sizes range from about 3MB up to 10MB -- and all of it is all text, no graphics.

Now the text corrections came in, I'm having second thoughts. Was InDesign the proper choice for this? Here is the problem:

Every single mouse click, page turn, scroll, or deletion or insertion of a single character costs at least 10, and sometimes as much as 20 seconds.

I've created large books before with this very same version, even processing up to 500 pages of text (prior to splitting them up into chapter-sized files, just for added convenience); but I've never seen this kind of infuriating/teeth gnashing/immensely frustrating behavior before. Sure, I am a reasonable guy and it's to be expected that ID gets slower with ever more complex layouts and text formatting. But really: click in a word, wait 10 seconds, press Delete, wait 10 seconds?

By the way, the reason I am still sticking to CS4 instead of upgrading to one of the newer versions is because those run yet even slower (it's really funny: I've found that ID CS5.5 is already feeling sluggish when there is nothing on your screen but a blank document -- har, har, har ...). I can't imagine "upgrading" would suddenly make these files whiz about my screen.

Perhaps I should downgrade the docs to CS3, do my corrections with that, then re-load them into CS4?

Ta for this attempt, Peter. But it's a dictionary -- not a single cross reference in sight!

FYI, there were a few document-wide corrections, which would easily have been done with opening all docs and doing a global All Documents search-and-replace. I attempted to cancel this after waiting for an hour ... and ID even refused to do that ... so I hadda kill it. I then resorted to a one-document-at-a-time Search/Replace, but even then it took about 15 minutes per document to change, oh, something like 40 to 80 occurrences.

Initially, I was working on the files from a network (I know, others have reported problems with that, but we at the office seem to have a Very Good Network as we've never got any of those); I copied all of the files to my desktop but even that frowned-upon solution did not offer me solace.

For what it's worth, I did a book in CS4 of about 11 documents, 438 pages, text and photos with a few charts, but not quite as complex as your dictionary and never saw any slowdown at all, and I used find/change across all docs several times.

My gut feeling is that Mary might be correct, Mr. Ware. I've made dictionaries in InDesign (two! that means I get to use the plural!) that came off just fine, and I never experienced any serious performace issues. All long-doc performance problems I've experienced in ID, dictionary or no, have boiled down to stuff where ID would parse the entire n times ten to the third pages of the dictionary constantly, as it would need to for live xrefs, GREP styles, and the like.

I tried if it worked better with the dozen-or-so character styles emptied of their styling, but unfortunately that didn't make *any* difference at all. It figures -- the styles "do" something whether or not it's visible on screen; and I did *not* think of trying without the GREPs.

But it's Easter Weekend over here, and for some unimaginable reason Easter in Holland takes two days, not one, so I'm off the hook 'till Tues. Will Report Back.

't Was the GREP styles ... It wasn't even as if they were that complex, but they did add a layer of complexity by adding No-Breaks (and not even to much text either).[*]

Rather than temporarily removing the NoBreak in the applied character style, I just deleted all GREP styles from my paragraph styles. But it doesn't matter which temporary solution I choose, because any global change in the styling will have the text re-flown. However, I can live with that if it means I can get the work done in one day instead of ten.

[*] After reading Uwe's links (in German): it's not because of my particular application of No Break. It seems Extreme Slow-Down occurs as soon as you apply a GREP style to an element that occurs a lot; the contents of the GREP seems not to matter.

[After I killed off the GREP styles for foreign language alphabets and special characters, I found that the mentioned slowdown factor of 5-10x was even understated. Only now InDesign again shows it can fly. Work is fun again.]